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committed to programming his personal love of classical music on the station. But he could also see the weaknesses in the owner’s thinking that jeopardized what he had built. “[Hastings] was a visionary guy in early FM who had put this little network together,” Riepen said, “but he was not a businessman; nor was he anybody of any taste or discernment.” In his own role as a program director and classical music expert, Chiesa had to agree that even though Hastings clearly loved the music, his tastes were quite finite. “He knew what he liked, [but] he didn’t really know that much about classical music. He would call the station occasionally and yell, ‘Get that off the air! I’m not enjoying that’; and it would be in the middle of something great like ‘Scheherazade’ or even Beethoven. He could call and disrupt the whole flow of what you were doing, and you had to pacify him by saying that you would do it, whether you did or not.”
    Personal peculiarities aside, Hastings was still quite a man to respect, but his innovations and his achievements could only take him so far. It soon became obvious that the classical music he loved so dearly would not generate the amount of advertiser interest needed to keep his stations thriving, or even financially afloat. Chiesa remembered, “There were times where we didn’t get paid for three or four weeks.” The bill for the UPI (United Press International) newswire service went overdue for so long that the company sent workers to disconnect the teletype machine and haul it away. This did not end news reporting on WBCN , though: “Hastings told us, ‘Just read from the newspaper’; so that’s what we did. He also had problems with his rent [at 171 Newbury Street]. The building was owned by an old architect named Edward T. P. Graham, who was becoming quite feeble and would just sit around in the office below the studio with an elderly secretary. I heard T. Mitchell talking to the secretary once when he was several weeks behind in rent, saying that he’d like to do a memorial program for Mr. Graham when he passed away. So, he was willing to trade air time for rent!” Plus, he had proposed the deal for a sponsored radio eulogy before the subject had even died! Sometimes Hastings took the elevator down to the street and personally canvassed the crowds passing by on the sidewalk, looking for people who would donate money to the station. Time and time again, though, classical music lovers or friends of Hastings would arrive in the nick of time, like the 7th Cavalry, to put up fresh funds to cover the bills.
    As Hastings’s financial woes deepened, he became increasinglydesperate and open to almost any new possibilities for cash flow. In the early sixties, radio programmer Marlin Taylor had developed a winning format called beautiful music or easy listening. Taking advantage of the advanced fidelity available on the FM band, Taylor blended innocuous vocal songs with light orchestral hits to produce an inconspicuous mix for background listening. By 1966, after observing the success of several stations with this new format, Hastings contacted Taylor. Soon the sounds of Montavani, 101 Strings, Johnny Mathis, and the Ray Coniff Singers wafted with saccharine sweetness out of WBCN’S transmitter. “There was a period of several months where that’s all that we played,” Chiesa recalled. “Mitch liked beautiful music probably more than classical, because it was so bland and more accessible to him. But it didn’t work; the format petered out and we went back to the classical.” Chiesa also revealed that the first song played in the new format was “The Ballad of the Green Berets” by SS gt. Barry Sadler. Considering what WBCN would eventually become, the presence of beautiful music and particularly this song, a promilitary and Vietnam War anthem that went to number 1 in